Inventive forecasting tools for adapting water quality management to a new climate

Long-term climate change, extreme events, and seasonal variations in weather have profound impacts on water quality of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. This implies a pressing need for tools anticipating the impacts of these environmental changes, and enabling effective water management that safeguards the ecosystem goods and services freshwaters provide. This generates an incentive for the development of new water quality models, monitoring tools, and data products beyond current state. New data products from the climate sector and advances in environmental modelling have not been fully integrated into management of lakes and their catchments pointing to a largely unexploited potential in the water sector. Water managers will therefore profit from the education of a new generation of interdisciplinary trained professionals able to bridge fields such as data science, climate, hydrology, and freshwater ecology, who at the same time develop the necessary skills to translate knowledge and technical novelties into products useful for managers, policy-makers, and the general public. The primary objective of InventWater is to organize a platform providing cutting edge cross disciplinary education of tomorrow's water experts. The core activity is the research programme aimed at the development and real-world application of inventive water quality forecasting tools across a range of time-scales, to support fast and reliable decision making as well as long-term adaptation policies. InventWater will build upon a rich collection of previous projects on short and medium term forecasting, and will work across the Lake, Hydrology, and Agriculture Impact sectors within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (www.isimip.org) framework, to provide multiple long-term projections of impacts and adaptation options on a swathe of key water quality variables. Besides a holistic training for water quality modelling, InventWater will provide a unique training approach to learning complex complementary skills leading to independent and critical thinking which seeks for originality and innovation.